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On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 06:02:43PM -0600, Grant Taylor wrote: |
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> On 8/27/20 11:55 AM, Ashley Dixon wrote: |
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> > Nevertheless, as xkcd so brilliantly explains, TeX inspires a level of blind |
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> > trust in the content of a document [2]. As long as you avoid proposing |
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> > standards in the form of an animated GIF, you're probably going to be OK. |
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> > ;-) |
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> |
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> I wonder if this is a side effect of the fact that TeX / LaTeX is a |
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> difficult markup language to work in and takes considerably more time and |
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> effort than simple text. As such, there is a good chance that the idea that |
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> someone takes the time to express in (La)TeX is probably more completely |
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> thought out than simple text. After all, why would someone spend the time |
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> and exert the effort to finely polish a half baked idea in (La)TeX? |
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I might have worded it ambiguously in my initial response, but I only suggested |
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TeX be used once his idea had surpassed the "half-baked" stage. I can't really |
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comment on LaTeX, because I've never really used it; from the small snippets |
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I've seen, I just assume it's TeX with a hell of a lot of useful macros. I've |
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always just stuck to TeX, with a copy of the TeXBook handy. |
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The only significant issue I have with plain TeX are the difficulties regarding |
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CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), considering I write many documents in Trad. |
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Chinese and Japanese. I heard XeTeX fixed this, although I've never tried it. |
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> Given that things grow and evolve, I think it means that the reference |
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> implementation needs to be used /somewhere/ for the people maintaining it to |
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> gain experience and knowledge germane to said reference implementation. |
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> Granted, this can be a small subset and does not need to be on the front |
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> lines. |
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Yes, my comment was regarding production deployments of HillaryMail. |
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> I also think that it's important to keep in mind that sometimes there are |
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> external limitations that dictate what can and can not be done. Like the |
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> fact that communications circuits were not guaranteed to be 8-bit clean when |
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> email (RFC 822 and what predates it) and SMTP (RFC 821 and what predates |
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> it). It's not any more fair to blame the authors of RFC 821 for not |
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> supporting 8-bit than it is to blame Sir Tim Burners-Lee for not including |
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> encryption when he developed HTML and HTTP. |
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Absolutely, but we are not talking about the absence of features here: rather |
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the addition of "features" to arbitrarily limit the flexibility of a |
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transportation protocol. Sir Burners-Lee would certainly be on my list-of- |
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undesirables if he took steps to _prevent_ encryption from ever appearing in |
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future versions of the protocol! ;-) |
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-- |
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|
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Ashley Dixon |
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suugaku.co.uk |
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2A9A 4117 |
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DA96 D18A |
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8A7B B0D2 |
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A30E BF25 |
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F290 A8AA |
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